Heads up on New Year's Eve, as possums and pickles fall

A pickle drops in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania. Likely it is a dill pickle.

If you miss that one, you can catch the other pickle dropping in Mt. Olive, North Carolina. Here the pickle is three feet long and glows in the dark.

For something a little different, a possum is dropping in Tallapoosa, Georgia, at the same time pickles are dropping. Midnight on New Year’s Eve. It turns out that the Tallapoosa possum has a name. And it is Spencer.

Spencer is suspended in a wire ball covered in Christmas lights. Up until shortly before midnight good ole Spence is kept at ground level so revelers can have their picture taken with him. Then at the bewitching hour, he is heaved up to the top of the American Hometown Realty Building. And, yep, at midnight with bands playing and people cheering he is lowered to the ground.

Then all is well to start a new year.

When it was determined that the possum was a bit much to feed and handle the remainder of the year, another possum, it was assumed, was conveniently found dead in the woods and gratuitously stuffed by a local taxidermist by the name of Bud Jones.

A lot of people go to Tallapoosa, Georgia, to celebrate New Year's Eve and to get their picture taken with the now dead critter.

This event differs from the possum drop in Brasstown, North Carolina. For a lot longer, Brasstown used the real thing - a live, hissing possum with an attitude.

It was not until recently that Brasstown got its possum’s tail clipped by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - or People for the Eating of Tasty Animals - depending on how you feel about it). This group decided that dropping a possum in a cage covered with Christmas lights was an embarrassment to the possum, and that the whole thing was an outrage. So PETA went to court.

The result was that the good people of Brasstown were presumably stuck with an unhappy but quite popular possum. They just couldn’t put it in a cage and lower it from a high building. So the people of Brasstown became creative and turned their live possum into a dead one, like their neighbors to the south in Tallapoosa. Today no one really discusses how the live possums and the dead ones look a lot alike.

Anyway, now that the possums are dead, they’re legal.

Elsewhere, there is more stuff dropping on New Year’s Eve than what you might imagine.

Just up the road from Washington, D.C., in Frederick, Maryland, someone is dropping a key. There are no reports as to what kind of a key is being dropped, but it is a really, really big key. The idea is that the whole thing is somehow a homage to Francis Scott Key, who wrote the Star Spangled Banner, was from Frederick, and has the honor of having a shopping center north of town named after him.

In Vincennes, Indiana, someone got the idea that dropping exactly 17 watermelons was the best way to bring in a new year. And that celebration makes quite a splash.

In Easton, Maryland, they’re dropping crabs.

The folks in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, are dropping 10-pound hunks of Lebanon bologna.

People in Boise, Idaho, get excited about dropping a pretend potato made out of some sort of foam.

The other shoe is dropping in Akron, Pennsylvania.

As midnight strikes, a 30-pound ceramic flea is dropping in Eastover, North Carolina. Then a cannon fires.

People in Atlanta, Georgia, are dropping an 800-pound pretend peach.

A cherry is dropping in Traverse, Michigan. A beach ball in Bangor, Maine. And a pineapple in Sarasota, Florida.

Which brings us to the giant ball that’s dropping in Times Square in New York City.

Millions of people watch this thing every year and have been doing so since 1907. In the last 110 years the giant ball has grown substantially. In fact it has ballooned from a 700-pound iron-and-wood sphere to a huge globe weighing in at 12,000 pounds.

So what is the big deal about New Year’s Eve? People around the world have been celebrating the turn of the year dating back at least four thousand years to ancient Babylon. As calendars evolved and became more accurate, the changing of the new year took on both religious and political significance.

Today, the coming of the new year has many different meanings. A time to celebrate. A time to reflect. An opportunity for change, goal setting and resolution. But most of all, the new year is a guidepost that reminds us that another year has passed and the promise of a clean slate is in front of us.

Our eldest daughter, Polly Anna, was married some years ago on New Year’s Eve. And now this year, it is our eldest son, Christopher, who will be married on New Year’s Eve as well. For both of them and their spouses New Year’s Eve marks a new beginning. A rebirth, if you will, into a new life and the seeds to a new family.

There is no better time than this New Year’s Eve for all of us to take note of our accomplishments this past year and to set our goals for the coming year. As time passes us by, it is good to know that there is much more to life than dropping things.

Happy New Year!

Bill Gindlesperger is a central Pennsylvanian, Shippensburg University trustee and founder of eLynxx Solutions that provides software for managing direct mail, marketing and print. He is a board member, campaign adviser, published author, and News Talk 103.7 commentator. He can be reached at Bill.Gindlesperger@eLynxx.com